ECOR strains

Yesterday I was filling in the form to apply for a permit to import pathogenic bacteria, so we could get the 'ECOR' set of E. coli strains. This is a set of 72 different E. coli strains from many different human and animal sources, chosen by Howard Ochman and Bob Selander to represent the diversity of this species.

Since Ochman and Selander's original analysis (1984) they've been examined for many different genotypes and phenotypes. The group that maintains the strains has a long list of papers describing work on them, but it only goes to 2001. So just now I did a Google Scholar search for 'ECOR collection' and one of the top hits was a paper by a UBC colleague, Julian Davies, describing these strains' repertoire of antibiotic resistance genes carried on integrons.

So I just emailed Julian. If he already has these strains, we won't have to bother importing them!